


what it is to wage war

by orphan_account



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Gender-Neutral My Unit | Byleth, Multiple Lifetimes, byleth repping all my theydies and themtelmen... love u bruv, i tagged the chars that are directly interacted with and then also claude but like gangs all there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Sothis said that both sides of time were revealed to me, and to me alone,they’d wanted to write,I don’t think she ever imagined it like this,but then came Nemesis and the entry was abandoned on the floor, crumpled and forlorn. Time moved forward. They found it again in two days’ time, and it was the first thing they remembered. Byleth, color, person.
Kudos: 6





	what it is to wage war

**Author's Note:**

> hi wow this is the first thing ive posted in um 7 years? this is borne of the first few weeks of quarantine and how ive experienced time since this whole bs has started and fueled by the idea of byleths journal when u start a new game plus. unbeta'd and please be forgiving of any formatting errors i am so bad at computers even though i try my best. i only ever read fics on my phone so thats what my ao3 experience is dear comp users i apologize

They’ve lost count of how many lifetimes have moved through them, how often they’ve seen the sorrow in the eyes of those they hadn’t chosen, the hurt behind cloudy blue and dim green and neutral violet, but Byleth knows it’s for the best.

They remember the first time. They’d recruited only a select few, blissfully unaware insofar as it could’ve been blissful after being fished from the river, strategizing and planning and hopeful as they’d moved through the monastery, training and teaching and bonding. Their enemies were nothing more than little red flags pinned to the wall-wide map in the war room. Morale was high, despite Dimitri’s ravaged state, and off they went to chase their dreams.

Then, they’d stood atop the burning stronghold and loosed an arrow clean through the wing of Claude’s wyvern and watched as he tumbled down to earth in the springtime sun along with their foolish, hopeful ideas of what war would be. War was not the clean, noble battle they’d thought it would have been, an army of allies against a faceless foe; instead it was old friends turning against each other, not out of vengeance but out of necessity and a desperation to protect what they hold dear from being snuffed out, carefully blank stares and unbidden tears freely dispersed as grim reality set in over everyone on that damned field. Byleth had felt entirely out of their depth, a feeling new and uncomfortable that started in the pit of their stomach and spread to the tips of their fingers and the crown of their head, leaving them top-heavy and teetering whichever way the winds blew. They were rescued by Flayn (who, they remembered dimly, has been through all this before), ripped apart and reassembled elsewhere as the stronghold gave out underneath their feet. Their chest burned and their muscles ached. They spearheaded the final push towards the smear of red left in the corner of the field, slashing through friend and foe alike. For each tear that clawed its way down their cheeks, they wished they could push beyond the limits of Sothis’s power, turn the clock back six years to escape this anguish, reach out to Edelgard to make things right, safely tuck those left for dead on the battlefield into the corners of their classroom, give everyone they could a chance at happiness and a shot at peace, and then Dimitri roared with the anguish of a beast that lost its prey and the day was won.

Time moved forward. The day’s victors celebrated underneath Bladdyd blue, cheering and drinking and toasting to their good fortune before prudently retreating into themselves to lick their wounds and mourn their losses away from the jubilation of those who had not known the dead. Byleth, staring into the thin flame of the last candle on their desk, remembered the way Dimitri and Claude had looked at each other, before this place became a stronghold commanded by those too worn for their youth. The two had been courting- the decorative dagger Dimitri kept on his person changed one day from an understated piece with his crest carved into the hilt to a beautiful thing of fine gold and praiseworthy Almyran steel, a bright emerald set in the pommel, and Claude’s earring changed from the simple steel ring he always wore to a gleaming silver drop with a perfect sapphire hanging just below the curve of his jaw. They reminisced about walking past the two on warm summer days, taking tea among the flowering bushes and under the gentle shade of the courtyard gazebo, eyes only for each other and murmuring to the space between the teacups. Dimitri’s ears had always turned a little red, and Claude had always tangled their feet and called him _Dima_ when he thought no-one was around to hear. Byleth sighed, weariness sinking into their posture and dragging the tip of their quill too deep in the inkwell. Perhaps it was better he hadn’t seen Claude fall. Dimitri didn’t need any more ghosts.

They’d told all of this to their journal. The old thing, made of a notebook they’d found during a raid with Jeralt and reinforced with leather scraps, had quickly become their most trusted confidante after they could no longer speak with Sothis. It had small profiles of each student; likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, goals, relationships and other such formalities, but as of late it was filling up more and more with their innermost worries after the campaign had begun. So, to their companion, Byleth said their good-byes, explored thoroughly how much they hated this, how much they wished the divine pulse was truly infinite in its divinity, how badly they wanted answers.

How easily I lived as the Ashen Demon, they wrote. Perhaps it was a blessing I did not know my enemy. They closed the notebook.

Time moved forward. Dedue returned (in Duscur colors, they told their journal that evening, how elated Ashe must be), Roderigue fell (Felix was not in his room tonight, but in the knight’s hall with Sylvain, and I think he allowed himself to feel in a way he hasn’t for a long time), and Dimitri came back to himself, standing above his ghosts, but the deep shadow underneath his good eye betrayed their everlasting hold. Sometimes, he still feels distant, Byleth wrote, like his feet are carrying him around Garreg Mach, but his eye is so unfocused I’m not sure where he thinks he really is. Hopefully, he’ll keep coming around in short order. I don’t know what we’ll do if he doesn’t. They closed the notebook.

Time moved forward. Cordelia was dethroned, and Dimitri reinstated (we all breathed a sigh we didn’t know we were holding when he acted like a real king and the public took well to him; whatever it is Mercedes has been working on him with has had excellent results), Hubert finally killed and the city of Enbarr taken, just up to the Palace (Cyril is doing a sweep over the city, they scrawled on the march towards Edelgard, I’ve never seen him so in awe of being somewhere new), and at long last, the eagle fell to the jaws of the lion, putting an end to the madness, the war, the bloodshed. They closed the notebook and left it on their desk.

Or, so Byleth had thought. How naïve of them.

They left the tower that evening, warm and happy and excited to spend this new age of peace in the arms of another, when everything went black. Fainting was not unheard of for them, so they expected to wake back up to familiar, worried eyes, to perhaps have their head cradled into the crook of a shoulder, to laugh it off and continue as they were.

Instead, a throne appeared in the darkness. It glowed a faint green. “Oh, my. What could’ve brought you here?”

And so, it began. Spin the wheel- Byleth, white, Linhardt. Byleth, yellow, Claude. Byleth, blue, Ingrid. Byleth, yellow, Marianne. Byleth, color, person. Byleth, color, person. At some point, the Ashen Wolves made themselves known, an interesting pause in the monotony. A short break in their spiral towards nothing. Byleth, yellow, Yuri. Byleth, white, Felix. Byleth, color, person. Byleth, color, person. Going through the motions of the first few months became mindless. Open their journal, somehow left over from the last cycle, and remember. Make the rounds. Tell Felix they wanted to spar, tell Caspar he couldn’t take them in a fight, dine with Lysithea and Annette at the behest of Sylvain. Win the mock battle, rout the bandits, begin expecting students to come up with personal battles to drag them out on campaign for. Around when they stopped counting the times they’d been through this, they needed a new journal. They asked Seteth for one, transferred the most important information, and slipped the old one into a drawer to collect dust. Nobody questions if they show up a fantastic professor, unmatched swordsman, and powerful mage if there’s nothing to compare them to. Byleth, color, person.

The second time, the initial week at the monastery had traveled through them in a haze. Dimitri was not king, but carefully conducting himself in a princely manner, murmuring with Dedue and brushing off searing looks from Felix. Claude was not extending relations from Almyra, but slipping his soon-to-be-infamous concoctions into Lorenz’s drinks and slinking from his room at night to send letters destined for far, far away. Edelgard was alive and well, examining everything around her with that telltale calculating eye, loomed over by Hubert in the way that those with sensitive skin hide under a parasol. Not that there are knives in parasol pleats, Byleth wrote in the early evening after they were assigned a house, but he is very crafty and her wish is his command. It had been particularly difficult to see the Black Eagles. Their dying declarations of Imperial loyalty were still rattling around Byleth’s brain. To see the young, hopeful faces of those they had slain hours before was taxing beyond compare. I know I’m not supposed to cry yet, they confided sometime in the hours before dawn as tears splotched down onto the pages, but this is too much, even for me. Time moved forward. The sun rose, they closed the notebook. Byleth, color, person. 

They’d tried asking Sothis, once. If she knew anything about multiple lifetimes, endless cycles, being stuck in an eternal loop of the same.

“Well, I do not know much of anything,” she’d said, floating pensively in the corner between the bed and the wall, “However, it seems to me like such a cycle would be punishment for something.” She looked at them with round, inquisitive eyes. “Do you have something to repent for?” Does a wolf feel the need to make up for its wrongdoings, or a moose or a bear? I’m not one, they wrote after Sothis disappeared again, but I doubt an animal has the space to consider its losses like that. Penance is borne of the human need to be considered _good_ , a never-ending strive for perfection in order to live with the sins of the past. Perhaps, then, it was no wonder Dimitri had become a beast. They closed the notebook.

The entry from the day they had found out what Rhea had done to them is a mess. Stashed away in a notebook deliberately forgotten, decaying in the bottom drawer of their dresser, those few pages are warped and weathered, read time and time again, the ink blooming with little circles as multiple lifetimes’ worth of tears forced it across its space, barely legible, but it doesn’t matter because Byleth knows what it says by heart. Rhea says that I have Sothis’s heart instead of my own, it reads. I was meant to die. I was never supposed to be here. Maybe I was right when I told Sothis I was a ghost, because in Rhea’s eyes I never was and will never be anything more than a means to an end, just the shell for her beloved mother to inhabit. She wanted to speak with Sothis, they wrote. She never wanted anything to do with me, and now here I am, living again and again and again. _Sothis said that both sides of time were revealed to me, and to me alone_ , they’d wanted to write, _I don’t think she ever imagined it like this_ , but then came Nemesis and the entry was abandoned on the floor, crumpled and forlorn. Time moved forward. They found it again in two days’ time, and it was the first thing they remembered. Byleth, color, person.

Byleth, yellow, Sylvain.

The campaign had returned from Sreng a few days ago, having passed through Gautier territory on the hunt to appease one of Claude’s inklings about the region. Sylvain had just been released from the infirmary after suffering an injury at the hands, or perhaps wings, of whatever it was Saint Macuil had come to be. They found him on the bridge to the cathedral, leaning on the wall and looking out towards the horizon. The sun had just started to set, pinks and purples creeping in on the blanket of blue that set the scene for a troop of flyers on evening patrol. They came to rest on his left, looking at his profile in the waning summer sun. He smiled at them, nodded, but said nothing, and a comfortable silence settled in. Byleth felt quite special in these moments with him; Sylvain always was a quiet person at heart. They let him break it whenever he wanted to, if he wanted to. When he did, they asked him how he was healing up (as well as could be hoped, although these new aches were making old ones flare up again), how it had been travelling through his home territory (fine, but they passed a few landmarks that dredged up memories long stifled, and he was thankful Felix had been along for the journey), and other such things.

“Sylvain,” They said, watching someone green to wyverns take an uncomfortably familiar tumble, “Do you ever feel that you have something to repent for?”

“Wow, Professor, what’s this about? Did one of my broken hearts find her way to you again?” They gave him a withering look. Sylvain laughed, a small, sorrowful thing. He looked at the ground and rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess I feel like I still have to make up for Miklan’s wrongdoings.” He paused. Byleth waited. “Even though he’s just another ghost. I want to prove him wrong and be seen for more than just my Crest. Something tells me you already knew that, though, Professor.” He threw his hands behind his head, smiling like he was in on some secret they shared. “But if you think I feel bad about chasing all these lovely ladies around, you’ve got another thing coming!” he declared, and cackled as hard as the day is long. They smiled. Refreshingly earnest when he wants to be, that Sylvain, they wrote. Felix is very lucky.

Byleth, white, Petra.

They’d asked the same of Petra once, standing to the side of the door as she went about stable duty. She’d grown to become a fine young woman, befitting of her royal nature. Quick of wit and sharp of reflex, an absolute monster on the back of her winged mount, a beacon of hope and determination even when streaked with dirt and smeared with blood. They were proud of all their students, but she held a special place among the rest. “If I am having understanding of what the word repenting means, professor, I am not sure if I feel I must be repenting for something. I am wanting to restore the pride of Brigid, but I am not thinking that restoring the pride of Brigid is repenting, because I am not the one who lost it.” She paused, her hand on her chin as she thought, the currycomb she’d borrowed from Ingrid resting gently on the pelt of the pegasus she was working with. It huffed and stomped its hooves a little. They do so like to be brushed clean. The evening light streaming in from behind Byleth illuminated her wonderfully even as she ducked to dodge the delighted spread of a wing when she continued on and worked at a sweet spot on its belly. It highlighted her intricate braids and tattoos, physical manifestations of her love for Brigid that she takes painstaking care of and will carry with her until her dying day. “That is something my grandfather is repenting for, but I am not my grandfather. No, professor, I am not thinking I must be repenting for anything.” She’d smiled, small and true, a welcome (if rare) sight in those final days of war. Her heart knows what it wants. I admire her tenacity and determination, they’d written that evening, watching over a sparring match between Seteth and Caspar.

Byleth, color, person.

They’d asked Hubert once, just after Jeralt died, one of the few things that never got easier. “I’ve never been much for condolences,” He’d said, as always. That was quite rude of him, they’d thought time and time again, so they may as well fire an uncomfortable question back.

“Do ever feel like you have something to repent for, Hubert?”

“My, professor.” He smiled, slick and waxing. Where his eyes should have crinkled, they instead narrowed to a lethal point. It did not suit him, no matter how hard he tried. “Asking questions, are we? I’m not sure I’m so inclined to answer. I’ve never been much for doling out secrets, the way, say, Ferdinand might be.” He stalked out of the room and into a shadow. I always want to know more about what’s going on behind those unusual eyes, Byleth told their journal late in the evening, but I don’t think he’d ever tell me, even if I was on his side of the field. Perhaps a better question would have been, if you remove one’s humanity, in the moments before becoming something else, when is it that the thought of penance disappears?

Byleth, blue, Dimitri.

It wasn’t something they intended on asking him. They’d come to learn that some version of “Byleth” always stayed behind, even as they were propelled forward into the next cycle. It was a comforting thought, but they could tell that it was going to be Bladdyd blue they met in the tower this time, and they did not want the question to haunt him until the end of his days when there was a chance the archbishop left over would have no recollection of ever asking it. “I have been thinking quite a bit,” He’d said to them, in a version of the evening before Enbarr, Arehadbar propped up against a tree as he kept careful watch over the encampment, arms crossed and shoulders tight. Much trouble for him, thinking was, they’d reflected into their journal many times over many lives. “I spent so long believing I was going to give the dead what they wished, that I was going to repent on their behalf. As you know, professor, it drove me to the depths of madness, and it is nothing short of a miracle that I returned.” They’ve known time and time again. They looked up at him. The ruff of his cloak hid up to the bridge of his nose. The dying light reflected the settlement below into one clear, blue eye, focused intently on the horizon in a way that would’ve been unfathomable two months prior. “I believe it is high time to start living for myself, and for the people of Fòdlan whom yet thrive. Five and a half years was penance enough.” Byleth knows that it will be a lifetime’s worth of work for Dimitri to truly rebuild himself from what he had fallen to, a never-ending fight for sleep and to resist falling into habits old and comforting in their detriment. They hope that whatever Byleth remains after the tower in two days’ time is willing to do so with love and patience. They lay a hand on his forearm. He’s running hot through his armor, and the tips of his ears are red.

“Thank you for trusting me with this. I’m very proud of you.” They say, because it’s true. Each and every one of their students grows up well, every time. Even Edelgard, they confide in the moments before the final march began. Perhaps penance is what helps keep up humanity, keeps those who have done wrong in line and keeps them striving to be better. They faint at the bottom step of the tower.

Over all these lifetimes, Byleth knew not what they must repent for. 

It seemed to them reason enough that saving the vast majority of those in Garreg Mach and ushering Fòdlan into an era of peace over and over and over again should have sufficed. Whatever it was they had done in their time before Sothis could not have been so reprehensible that they should be subject to this, and yet, here they were. Byleth, color, person. So, seeing that their efforts were all for naught, they stopped caring. They had been pushed beyond the pain, reached some kind of purgatory where everything was nothing, and all seven years became as the first three months. They often wondered what would happen if they let one of the students in on the secret, calling Claude by his real name, or addressing the Flame Emperor as Edelgard when she asks them to join her forces after she tries to distance herself from the Agarthans. Byleth pitied her, in a way, lifetime after lifetime of being on the receiving end on their sword or of Dimitri’s spear. At least I’m living with the knowledge I will always be victorious, they wrote. She has no such luxury.

It is in the Imperial throne room, stomach turning as they look again upon what Edelgard had become to achieve her goals, that Byleth has a thought. They are all not but something through which to carry out a goal. Rhea is the vessel for the last will of Zanado. Edelgard the vessel for all that is right and good strayed down the wrong path, Dimitri the vessel for the dead, Claude the vessel for a wish of unity. Maybe I’ve been the vessel for all the previous versions of myself, sharing the love and light Rhea knew Sothis to have with a different person each lifetime, Byleth muses, slicing clean through the beast at the foot of the throne. Blood seeps into their pale cloak and into the soles of their shoes, staining them a deep red from the bottom up. Perhaps, if nothing else, it was time for a change.

The throne appeared in the darkness. They awoke once again in Remire village, and when they set their sights on Edelgard for the first time in this next life, they knew the path they walked would be a brilliant crimson.

Byleth, red, Edelgard.

On a Sunday where the frosts that crept up the windows of Garreg Mach sent even the most resilient of students seeking the warmth of a fire, Byleth accompanied Edelgard to oversee the abdication of the throne. Ionius IX was unfathomably old, and the process was nothing like the dictatorial forcing of hand that they had always thought it to be. Instead, it was a somber affair; Ionius knew what he had done, and that this was his price to pay. He wholeheartedly entrusted the future of the Empire to Edelgard. The crown weighed heavily upon her head as she immediately began her reforms, exiling Duke Aegir where he stood. In the following days, Byleth turned their back on the Church and the Black Eagles Strike Force was christened to the sound of the Immaculate One’s righteous fury. Muscles on the brink of atrophy had to be whipped back into shape, and they remembered what it was to wage war as Cyril fell to a nasty bout of black magic that stained the tips of their fingers and traveled up into their veins. They were reminded of Claude those many lifetimes ago, and what it meant to fight for a cause as Edelgard had so nobly done for so, so long. The walls were breached, and they fell once again.

Time moved forward. Byleth awoke, made their way back to the monastery, and reunited with their students. It is hard talking to our members who are not from the Empire, they confided to a new journal Edelgard had gifted them (endearingly nervous as she did so and having pointedly denied Hubert from doing it in her stead), even though there’s only a few of them. They left everything behind to support Edelgard and her vision. It will be hard for them to see old friends on the battlefield.

That was how they thought, anyway, until they took Derdriu. Hilda, Judith, and Nader had all been sent to die, and the Claude felled by Aymr’s blade was not the one Byleth had known and come to love over many lifetimes. The head that rolled off the pavilion did not belong to a unifier of nations and holder of hearts, but to a merciless tactician for whom everything was expendable save his own life. After the battle, Hubert had told them he’d always admired that about Claude. It took a particular kind of genius to have that many plans laid out, coming up with and accounting for so many situations, he’d said, it was a pity he hadn’t calculated for his own failures. They’d felt no remorse as his skull sank into dark waters. The same held true for the Dimitri and Dedue they met on the Tailtean Plains; Byleth knew no Dimitri with both eyes, lucid only because he’d attached himself to Rhea’s belief in him as her proxy in the field of battle, not a slave to his ghosts but to the whims of a mad god. Cruelty has a way of making sense no matter what side you’re on, Lysithea had said, drenched and sinking slowly into the muddy ground, watching what Dedue was willing to become in a stark mirror of the Edelgard they had met and killed so many times before. No, these were not the children they once knew. They felt no remorse as this Dimitri’s blood pooled at their feet.

The journal Edelgard gifted them had come to be full at a breakneck pace. The entries rumbled and stirred like an ancient beast shaking dust of its thousand-year slumber, starting small, one or two sentences about the events of the day, before building and building and finally exploding, single events between their students taking up pages and pages of their mind. Teatimes, meals, conversations overheard that were not meant for their ears (including a delightfully awkward exchange of gifts between Hubert and Ferdinand, who had come so very far in regard to one another despite both being horribly dense) and simple monastery gossip took up the space. The Black Eagles pointedly did not take the lives of their former classmates unless absolutely, unequivocally necessary. Byleth felt, for the first time in who knows how long, like they had a purpose. They closed the notebook and traced the embossed Crest of Flames on its cover.

Time moved forward. The Strike Force pushed on towards Fhirdiad, and the Immaculate One paid in blood for the sins of her hubris, defiled by the false Relic lodged in her skull. As many as can be are rescued from the burning city. A new Fòdlan is born as the light of dawn crests the stronghold, announcing the victory of humanity over the old gods to claim the land truly as their own, and Byleth dies. The crest stone in their chest shatters, and for a moment they know what it is to be truly at peace. The unearthly green bleeds from them and their heartbeat starts like a foal taking its first steps, stuttering and stumbling and with a great deal of effort. They come around, cradled in the crook of a shoulder, looking up blearily into the eyes of their loved one, the way they thought they would have all those lifetimes ago. An echo of a Sothis long past asks them what it was they had to repent for. For what, they are still not sure, but as they leave arm in arm with Edelgard, they realize that there is an entire lifetime for them to figure out what it is to be human.

Red did always suit them best.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading! please leave comments! i'm gonna try to start an upload sched but that means i have to like... have things to upload. come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/mysterymistakes) and keep up to date thru my [tumblr](https://mysterymistakes.tumblr.com/)! both @mysterymistakes if the links aren't working. all of these accounts are quite fresh so any interaction would mean the world!


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